A metal sculpture of a hop cone, almost silver, leaves overlapping with a stem sticking out, rests on a brick platform with a plaque below saying, ‘Hop Sculpture’ and some words about the creator and how beer was produced on this site for over 200 years. But now no more. It shines in the early spring sunshine, a ‘hello I’ve been plonked in an art exhibition’ kind of vibe, a crazy head without eyes, perhaps, sharp and dangerous looking blades. This is where Ward’s Brewery once stood and all that remains is the top of the entrance arch, blackened and discoloured, fixed between two modern red brick columns, an inclination towards a Roman triumph, through which the legions once marched, or maybe it is reminiscent of a wounded soldier being led off a battlefield between two comrades. In reality this is what all that is left of a once thriving and popular brewery, which served the thirsts of the working men and women of the city. The words SHEAF BREWERY can be seen on the top of the arch and below AR ’S BREWERY’ on the road facing side and on the other WARD S BREW Y. All that is left is just a relic, a slice of heritage, a showtime of history, just a relic, the promise of eternal life dissolved.
The site of the brewery is now offices, all glass and red brick, named Wards Exchange (note the absence of the apostrophe) and behind the offices are multi-storied flats. There is a Wetherspoons next to the arch, The Sheaf Island; this is also glass fronted and there are flats above. The building is called Barley House, and it has incorporated part of the vanished brewery at the back, redbrick with an extension built on top; next to that there is another remnant, brown-yellow brick this time, with an arch into what was once a brewery yard. Elsewhere, memories of the past jingle like loose change in the pocket with a block of flats, behind the offices, named Porter Brookhouse.
Traffic roars past on Eccleshall Road. In the Wetherspoons, a beer festival is advertised in the window, and several men are sitting at tables looking through these windows out onto the road, patiently waiting for Godot or for another pint. I move back to walk into town and pass an ad for the COOP funeral services, ‘We know one last drive past the Gardens would mean so much’. A smiling man and woman in black look at the camera and the woman has a cane in her hand, ceremonial perhaps. There is a cold wind on this sunny day, and traffic heads for the secular temple of Waitrose.
An hour of so later, the ruins of the Cannon Brewery, Neepsend, a closed-in-1999 brewery whose name I saw the day before picked out in a mosaic-like floor in the entrance to the Fat Cat. This time I think of Mad Max, an outpost of lost industrialism, destruction, corporate washing of hands, a lonely outpost at the end of the world. In this industrial estate possibly becoming gentrified, traffic rolls on by, the smack of tyre on wet tarmac, ‘let’s go to the Wickes mega store’, imagined conversations in the car — in the background a wooded hill. I pass a 1919 building, once a steel making factory, now the Church Temple of Fun, ‘bar arcade coffee tattoo’ amongst its pleasantries.
Cannon Brewery remains, a giant washed ashore and its remains picked over by the crows of post industrialism. Thanatos. No glass in windows, graffiti splattered on walls, urban exploration, trespass, love making in the malt stores, a broken toothed, flattened nose of a complex ripe for development (which is promised). Over a quarter of a century of decay, corruption and entropic love. It’s funny, but I can almost smell the aroma of brewing in the air, ghostly, ghost riders in the sky. Around me there are flats, cafes, a garage from where loud drum and bass comes, but there is a sadness about the brewery, which is gutted, eviscerated, a deserted king left to rot by treacherous courtiers. Harry’s bar and kitchen, corrugated metal roof. Cutlery works. ‘The whole area has gone to shit’ sprayed on a wall. The Gardeners Rest pub, Heist Brewery next to it. This feels like an area of decay in which the brewery is just one aspect but later on I am told that there is an old Bass brewery in this to-be-developed area as well.
Why do I hunt out these relics? For me beer and brewing is more than a thirst-quencher, an intoxicant (fun as it is in small doses) and a business. It involves pubs, food and drink, sociability, people, community, heritage and history, and when we see the relics we have to realise that history doesn’t flow like we would like it to, for after all a river doesn’t always keep the same journey to the sea over the centuries. Sometimes history is a tapestry unpicked though those loose stitches when followed can get us out of the lair of the Minotaur.
Shameless plug: my latest book A Pub For All Seasons has had some great reviews in the press and is available from all good bookshops and online (Headline).
I only ever dranks Stones from cask and the last pint of the original brew that I drank was in a pub in Castleton, Derbyshire in the early 1990s.
A Sheffield craft brewery has brewed it recently to the original recipe and using the original water.
I tried it a couple of weeks ago. It was nice but it's so long since I dtank the original I couldn't say how authentic it was.
I'm a Sheffielder by birth and grew up drinking Wards and Stones beers, but especially the former. I was lucky enough to tour Wards Brewery in the 1980s, too. I recall on two occasions taking two different Welshmen into my local Wards pub and both of them came out saying it was the best beer they'd ever drunk.
It's sadly missed.